Knee Cartilage Recreated by IIT Delhi Team

Imagine, a patient, needs a knee cartilage replacement surgery and after the initial MRI and X-Ray tests the patient is wheeled into the operation theatre, next to the life support equipment is a printer which prints out the patient's cartilage tissue. The surgeons operate on the ailing patient, replace the knee cartilage with the printed out cartilage, sew the patient up and in a few weeks' time the patient is back to his or her regular life. This could very well be the future of knee cartilage replacement surgery.



Millions of people across the world suffer from degenerative knee cartilage issue; despite attempts world over scientists have been unsuccessful in recreating in the lab cartilage. Dr. Rajesh Malhotra, the Head of Orthopaedics at the All India Institute Of Medical Sciences elucidates why it is so, "All attempts at recreating the human knee cartilage have met with some degree of failure because the cartilage used as the replacement doesn't form to the full extent or forms into a tissue that isn't very durable".

For the first time, Indian researchers have able to achieve significant success in this direction. A team from IIT Delhi's Textile Technology department led by Dr. Sourabh Ghosh has achieved a breakthrough - the 3D printed bio ink knee cartilage. "Since last 30 years scientists have been trying to reproduce tissue engineered in the lab but our radical approach was to relook the entire process of development".
 

The rethink in approach led Dr. Ghosh's team to first develop a bioink that has high concentration of bone-marrow derived cartilage stem cells, silk proteins and a few factors. The chemical composition of the bioink supports cell growth and long-term survival of the cells. The cartilage developed in the lab has remained physically stable for up to 6 weeks in the lab.

This bioink is then loaded on to a 3D printer into which the dimensions of the required cartilage size can be entered and like any printer, once you click PRINT, the tissue of the required size is printed out. This construct can then replace the defective part of the cartilage in a patient's knee.

Shikha Chawla, a PhD scholar and a team member says, "The next step is to test this tissue in animals, where it needs to be seen if this tissue functions like an articular cartilage i.e. it retains sponge like properties with huge load bearing capabilities". The animal trials will be conducted in IIT Kanpur and will take about 3 months and once it's proven that the tissue transplant doesn't mutate into a transient tissue, becoming brittle like a bone then it can be taken forward to human clinical trials.

Also read: Knee Pain